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Sunday, September 06, 2015

On multicultural ethics

Isn't ethics just the business of determining which moral beliefs are right or wrong? Foreign cultures practice

1. Female Genital Mutilation

2. The Caste system in India

3. The forced marriage of prepubescent girls in India

4. The execution of adulterers and active homosexuals, and the flogging of women who engage in suspicious behavior in places like Afghanistan

5. The bribing of rape victims' families in South Korea.

6. The strict authoritarianism and glass ceilings of Japanese corporations.

All of these practices have a common element, they treat people unequally based on who they are. So, egalitarianism makes us on the one hand makes us want to treat other cultures as equals, and yet at the same time the very practices of those cultures that we are considering are anything but egalitarian.

3 comments:

"Isn't ethics just the business of determining which moral beliefs are right or wrong?"

No. "Ethics" just is the (vain) business of trying to come up with a system of public morality while adamantly denying that there is any such thing as a transcendent moral obligation upon one’s own private self.

"Isn't ethics just the business of determining which moral beliefs are right or wrong?"In some contexts, yes (the word "ethics" has a number of related meanings).

"Foreign cultures practice

1. Female Genital Mutilation2. The Caste system in India3. The forced marriage of prepubescent girls in India4. The execution of adulterers and active homosexuals, and the flogging of women who engage in suspicious behavior in places like Afghanistan5. The bribing of rape victims' families in South Korea. 6. The strict authoritarianism and glass ceilings of Japanese corporations."What do you mean by "suspicious behavior"? But regardless, okay, generally there are some (many) people in some cultures foreign from the perspective of present-day US that practices those things.

One might add:

1' Male circumcision (though that's not just "foreign" if you look at it from present-day US). 4'. The execution of adulterers and men who have sex with men in ancient Israel, at least if OT law was applied. 4''. The execution of people for many other consensual sexual behaviors between adults in ancient Israel, if OT law was applied. For example, let's say a woman's father "pledges" her to a man he chooses, but she chooses to have sex with someone else. Then, she's handed over to the man her father chose, and he legally rapes her. Then, he accuses her because the "tokens of her virginity" are nowhere to be found, and the punishment (if the standards of evidence are met) is to stone her to death.

"All of these practices have a common element, they treat people unequally based on who they are."Is that the case?

If the execution of adulterers is to treat people unequally based on who they are, why not the execution of serial killers, or the imprisonment of bank robbers?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the execution of adulterers is morally similar to the execution of serial killers or imprisonment of bank robbers.

However, the moral differences do not seem to be that some of those behaviors amount to treating people unequally based on who they are, and others do not.

In fact, the execution of adulterers, of serial killers, and the imprisonment of bank robbers seem to treat people unequally based on what they do, not on what they are. It's just that the first case is deeply unjust, as adulterers do not deserve to be executed - the relevant hadith and Bible passages are mistaken in implying so.

Similarly, if FGM is to treat people unequally based on who they are, why not the male variety?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that FGM and the male counterpart are morally similar. The former is a lot worse than the latter (and also, there are different variants of FGM, which are immoral to different degrees), but I fail to see any difference in terms of whether they treat people unequal based on what they are.

Do you have a definition of "egalitarianism" on which you base your assessments?

"So, egalitarianism makes us on the one hand makes us want to treat other cultures as equals, and yet at the same time the very practices of those cultures that we are considering are anything but egalitarian."Does the imprisonment of bank robbers violate egalitarianism? If so, then there you have a much more direct argument against egalitarianism. If not, I fail to see how the execution of adulterers does so. I would say the execution of adulterers is very immoral, unjust, etc., but how is it a violation of egalitarianism?

Perhaps, you could provide a definition of "egalitarianism", and/or a procedure to ascertain when a practice violates it?

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About Me

I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.